Global biodiversity deal is not pandemic proof
Authors: Arthur Wyns
Journal: The Lancet Planetary Health (2023)

At COP15 governments struck an ambitious global deal to protect biodiversity, but missed an opportunity to include strong targets on biodiversity and human health. Nearly 200 governments agreed to a global deal to protect biodiversity in December, 2022. Member nations attending the UN biodiversity conference, known as COP15, signed off on a global roadmap to transform society towards living in harmony with nature. The Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) contains four global goals and 23 specific targets, including a target to conserve 30% of the world's land and ocean by 2030. It will now guide the 193 governments that are part of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. The set of commitments, if implemented, will have far-reaching consequences for food production, businesses, supply chains, global finance flows, and, ultimately, the world's biological diversity. Human health is strongly linked to the diversity of life on Earth—from the millions of species of insects to the wide variety of plants, fungi and animals—and the complex web of ecosystems they form throughout our landscapes and seascapes. This biodiversity provides people with food, air, water, and medicine, supports mental and physical health, and reduces the impact of extreme weather events. The large scale of biodiversity loss currently taking place is therefore also undercutting the critical foundation that healthy communities depend on. The consequences of biodiversity loss for human health are well understood. For example, it could mean a decline in the available diversity of nutritional crop species, an increase in the risk of zoonotic (transmitted from animals to humans) or vector-borne (spread through intermediaries such as mosquitoes) infectious diseases, and threaten the livelihoods of many low-income households. Biodiversity loss also means that we are losing, before discovery, many of nature's chemicals and genes of the kind that have already provided humanity with enormous health benefits. The GBF—a successor of a previous set of biodiversity goals known as the Aichi targets—has the overarching aim to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. The 23 conservation targets of the new Framework are meant to help governments pull a wide range of policy levers to implement this lofty goal, and include commitments to halt human-induced species extinctions, restore 30% of degraded ecosystems by 2030, ensure the sustainable use and management of wild species, and provide financial support for conservation efforts amounting to US$30 billion per year paid from high-income countries to low-income and middle-income ones. Other targets are geared towards businesses, consumption, harmful subsidies, and other drivers of biodiversity loss. Importantly, the GBF also recognises the role of Indigenous peoples and local communities in conserving biodiversity. Initially due to take place in Kunming, China, in October, 2020, COP15 was postponed four times due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and eventually moved to Montreal, Canada, where the CBD is headquartered. Beyond causing logistical disruptions to biodiversity meetings, the pandemic also has a more profound relationship with biodiversity loss. The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES; also known as the IPCC for biodiversity) published a dedicated report on biodiversity and pandemics in 2020, concluding that “the underlying causes of pandemics are the same global environmental changes that drive biodiversity loss and climate change”. The CBD recognised the link between ecosystem degradation and pandemic risk for the first time in a 2016 decision, and convened a special session on COVID-19 in December, 2020. “COVID-19 has brought to greater public attention the linkages between biodiversity and health, especially with regards to the environmental drivers of zoonotic diseases”, said Laetitia Sieffert, a former health specialist at the CBD. Alongside a growing understanding of the relationship between biodiversity loss and pandemics, the concept of One Health has also gained traction; an approach underpinned by the assumption that the health of people, animals and other species, and ecosystems, are interdependent. The approach is stewarded by a coalition of four international organisations known as the quadripartite: WHO, the UN Food and Agriculture Organization, the UN Environment Programme, and the World Organization for Animal Health. The One Health approach was already included in the CBD's first-ever dedicated decision on biodiversity and health in 2014, and it has since developed guidelines on One Health. Both One Health and pandemic preparedness and response were expected to play an important part in the UN biodiversity negotiations, and prior drafts of the GBF published in 2021 and 2022 included separate targets for each of these issues. A dedicated target on One Health would have provided a stronger health mandate to the quadripartite, while a target on pandemics would have strengthened the relationship between the CBD and WHO, whose Member States are currently negotiating an international instrument for pandemic prevention, preparedness and response. Both health targets were dropped in the final round of COP15 negotiations. Instead, health became a cross-cutting issue throughout the GBF, with the first sentence of the Framework proclaiming “biodiversity is fundamental to human well-being, a healthy planet, and economic prosperity for all people, including for living well in balance and in harmony with Mother Earth.” “The proposal for specific targets on One Health came quite late in the process, and most Parties were resistant to further expand the number of targets. On the other hand, the final stages of the negotiations provided opportunities to integrate biodiversity-health linkages, including those related to disease risk, throughout the Framework,” said a spokesperson from the CBD secretariat. “It really is a missed opportunity that health was not incorporated,” said Anna Stewart Ibarra, the Scientific Director of the Inter-American Institute for Global Change Research. “We’ve seen in the pandemic the critical role of considering deforestation, land-use change, urbanisation—all of these socioecological drivers of biodiversity loss, and how they affect human health and the health of all non-human life.” Nonetheless, the GBF does acknowledge the interlinkages between biodiversity and health in various areas: it recognises the human right to a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment (similar to the COP27 UN climate conference); refers to the One Health approach; and sets a target for the improved use, harvesting and trade of wild species, in order to reduce the risk of pathogen spill-over. Outside of the Framework, a dedicated decision on health was also adopted at COP15, which included references to both One Health and pandemics, while tasking the CBD Secretariat with the development of a global action plan on biodiversity and health. Various observers to the COP15 negotiations pointed out that the separate COP decision might help strengthen the inclusion of health in the GBF, but is insufficient to compensate for the lack of dedicated health targets. The CBD also has a longstanding but rocky relationship with WHO. Both UN agencies have adopted decisions or resolutions on biodiversity and health, and in the past have coordinated through an Inter-agency Liaison Group on Biodiversity and Health, as well as a Joint CBD-WHO programme of work, now both disbanded. “There has been a position at CBD to ensure continued work on biodiversity and health,” said Sieffert. In 2023, when the CBD will start the development of its global action plan on biodiversity and health, the ongoing negotiations on a pandemic treaty at WHO will have clear entry points for biodiversity. The One Health approach continues to gain political momentum at G20 and G7 and gatherings. Many governments are also expected to update their national biodiversity plans (known as National Biodiversity Strategies and Action Plans) to align them with the targets set out in the GBF. “The health sector really needs to be engaged in these conversations ... they were absent from the conversation [at COP15],” said Stewart Ibarra. “We’ve also seen this happen again and again in the climate and health arena: If you don’t bring the health sector leaders to the table, if they’re not invested from the start with resources, time, personnel, money, and the willingness to change some of their decision-making processes, then in the moment you actually want to make a policy intervention, you have to do a lot of backpedalling to get them on board, and the opportunity will be missed.” For the CBD guidelines on One Health see https://www.cbd.int/doc/decisions/cop-14/cop-14-dec-04-en.pdf For the CBD guidelines on One Health see https://www.cbd.int/doc/decisions/cop-14/cop-14-dec-04-en.pdf